How do children overcome hazardous experiences to succeed in life? What can be done to protect young people at risk from trauma, war, disasters, and other adversities? Learn about the importance of fostering resilience in children at risk.
During this course, participants will: learn how trauma can affect children and the systems they depend on, gain insight into core concepts, research methods and lessons learned in last 50 years of resilience research, learn how research is being applied in the real world through interventions that promote resilience, and engage in discussions with others who are working with children at risk around the world
Participants are welcome to take the MOOC at no cost or to register for a Course Certificate ($49). Those who register and earn a Course Certificate from Coursera also are eligible to sign up for continuing education clock hours through the University of Minnesota.
Participants can earn 10 clock hours of continuing education credit (added cost $99) from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. Go here http://z.umn.edu/1a5q to register for continuing education clock hours for completing this course.

CJ

Week 1: Origins and Landmark Studies in the Science of Resilience in Children

The first module of this course provides an introduction to the course and to the science of resilience. Video lectures discuss the meaning of resilience and the origins of resilience science. Participants will begin to think about case examples of resilience from their own experience and plan for a resilience interview. In the forum discussions, participants will introduce themselves, discuss the meaning of resilience and its importance in their work. Participants also will nominate favorite films and books about true stories of resilience:

Преподаватели

Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LP

Regents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development

Текст видео

Welcome back everyone. In this segment, we're going to talk about the origins of resilience science, particularly in the study of children. We'll talk briefly about the influence of World War II, about some of the pioneers who generated the early science on resilience. Then we'll talk about four waves in resilience science. World War II had a devastating effect on children around the world. Many, many children were killed, injured, experienced starvation, the trauma of bombing, and many other awful experiences. Many children were orphaned by the death rate in World War II and people began, around the world began to realize what a terrible effect war had on children, and became very concerned about that. As a result, UNICEF was founded in the aftermath of the war, the, that's the United Nation's emergency fund for children, and they did what they could to try to help children recover from the aftermath of the war. Also, there were scientists and clinicians who began to study the effects, or observe the effects, of war on children. Two in particular were Anna Freud and her colleague, Dorothy Burlingham, who published a book on children in war in 1943, that described their observations. They ran some of the war nurseries for children affected by the war in Great Britain. It was difficult to do research during World War II, that's always true in war and disaster, it's just difficult in that kind of situation to carry out high quality studies. But people did try to gather data to try to understand what was happening to children, and to try to help them. And there were some striking lessons from those early observations, during and after the war. First of all, they realized the profound impact of separation and loss on children. That children reacted with great trauma to being separated from their parents. For example, during the blitz the bombing in Great Britain, in World War II, many children, like the children pictured here, were evacuated either into the countryside to safer locations away from London and other cities that were being bombed, or they were even evacuated across the ocean. And this little group of children looks happy, but many of the children who were evacuated, struggled because of the separation from their families. And the researchers and clinicians observed that separation sometimes could be more difficult than the trauma of the war experiences themselves. They also observed that children did react to trauma. They showed symptoms of shock and stress when they observed them in very dangerous situations. And yet they could also observe that if children were in the presence of the caregiver, usually a mother, then they would observe very little of those kinds of reactions. So already, people were beginning to realize the tremendous protective role of proximity to the attachment figures in a child's life. World War II also had a profound effect on these three individuals, who would come to play a crucial role in the emergence of developmental science and resilience. Norman Garmezy here was a young soldier in World War II, and he fought in the infantry. He was, took part in the Battle of the Bulge, for example. And after his years in the war, he went back home to the United States and became a clinical psychologist and eventually a very influential researcher and teacher, who began to study children at risk and then turned his attention to resilience. He was my mentor, and the mentor of many other students who became resilience scientists after him. Emmy Werner, shown here in the middle, was one of the young children in Europe who was profoundly affected due to the barmi, bombing and the starvation that many children experienced in, in Europe during and after the war. And she also experienced the help of humanitarian agencies like UNICEF and others who, who reached out to try to save these children. Emmy Werner would grow up to become the leader of one of the most important studies in resilience, a landmark study on the children of Kauai, which we're going to talk about very soon in this class. Michael Rutter, from Great Britain, was one of the children in, in World War II who was evacuated, in his case, evacuated across the ocean to America, where he stayed with a family during the war for safety. And he would grow up to become the world's leading child psychiatrist, and one of the most influential pioneers in the study of resilience. He did many important studies, but one of, one of his memorable studies was to follow the children adopted from orphanages in Romania, to try to understand how they recover in the aftermath of that kind of neglect and trauma. These three pioneers all began to study risk, initially. They were interested in the origins of mental illness or health problems, and they studied children at risk to try to understand how mental illness and other kinds of problems develop. But what all three quickly realized in their research was that there was tremendous variation in the way children responded to great trauma and adversity. And they had this important insight that we were spending all of our time studying risk and problems, and that we had neglected the study of children who do well and recover well. That we needed to understand the processes that lead to positive outcomes and recovery, in order to help other children who are not recovering as well. So they emphasized to a whole generation of other scientists, that studying ri, risk is not enough, and they gave a lot of energy to the theme of studying resilience in children who face adversity. Well, after the pioneers, those three and many others, got things underway, there have been four waves of resilience science. The first wave, like often the case in the early stages of any science, was focused on description. That people tried to figure out how, who is resilient? How do we measure that? What makes a difference? What are the protective factors that appear to account for how some children do so well when others don't? As people began to get a sense of what those factors were, they turned their attention to processes. How do these protective factors work? Because we're going to intervene, you need to know how they work to try to understand more deeply how to promote resilience in other children. When investigators felt they had some good ideas about protective processes, they began to do intervention experiments to try to demonstrate that you could indeed promote resilience. And that would also confirm your theories about what makes a difference. And we're currently in the fourth wave. The fourth wave is kind of a tsunami in resilience science because it's such a large complicated wave. It, it, it reflects the expansion of resilience science, across multiple levels of analysis, made possible by important advances in technology and methods for analyzing resilience at different levels. From a genetic level, to a brain level, to a social interaction level, to much higher levels in systems, like community resilience, global resilience and so forth. And the effort now is to try to understand resilience across different levels. How do different systems contribute to the resilience, for example, of an individual child? And we're going to be looking at research from all these different waves over the course. [SOUND]